Reading and Seething: Books That Make Us Angry

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If an author is getting the job done, their book will spark strong feelings in the reader. The books we remember the most evoke the strongest emotional reactions. The funniest memoirs, the saddest love stories, the most shocking biographies, the scariest novels. But what about the books that really tick us off? Anger is passionate, powerful and comes in many guises. But what would make a reader so angry they would hurl a book across the room?

There are some books that make me mad by virtue of being so promising and then falling disappointingly flat with a crappy ending or plot holes big enough to herd cats through. Miriam Toews’ memoir-style fiction A Complicated Kindness was one such book. I thought it was intriguing – a rebellious, creative teenager growing up in a Mennonite community – but I found it so poorly executed I wished she’d given the idea to someone else.

Sometimes a book makes me seethe with self-righteous indignation, which can feel good now and again. Take Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series. For all I complain about and criticize it, when I first started the first novel, I was at least pleased that the protagonist, Bella, seemed independent, opinionated, and strong, with her own interests, sense of identity and common sense. That lasted about 10 minutes before she met the bloodsucking love of her life and was reduced to a simpering puddle of subservience and needy angst, begging her pasty paramour to transform her into a fanged fiend because suddenly he was the only thing that mattered.

Many books elicit fury by appealing to our sense of goodness and justice. I remember reading To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time when I was perhaps 10 years old, and sobbing with helpless rage at the unfairness and ugliness of Tom Robinson’s so-called trial and the subsequent events. As an adult, I experienced a much more acute, terrible and lasting version of that feeling when reading Philip Gourevitch’s non-fiction account of the 1994 machete slaughter of 800,000 innocent people in Rwanda. The title, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, comes from an actual written plea for help from refugees hiding in a hospital. The author of the note was killed, along with the hospital’s other inhabitants the next day.

Being diagnosed with Gender Identity Disorder and "trained" to behave like a proper girl, the author describes her ordeal in a mental institution in the 1980s. Sure to elicit rage in any reader with a soul.